Cripple
by inkdragon13
Summary: Ultra Magnus is among the first disabled Autobots on Earth, despite having only been there for a short period of time. Of course, there is more being said here in the Transformers: Prime - Beast Hunters episode, Evolution, than the mech merely losing his hand...


**I honestly do not think that this really counts anymore, seeing that the episode aired last week, but I will say it anyway: This will contain spoilers. **

**I'd be the happiest teenager on Earth if I owned the Transformers. But I, unfortunately, do not. In my personal opinion, they own themselves, but legal documents state that the Transformers belong to Hasbro.**

Cripple

Hey, I'm Inkdragon13, and I am going to discuss the symbolic meaning behind Ultra Magnus losing his right hand in the Transformers: Prime – Beast Hunters episode, 'Evolution'. Or at least my take on the symbolic meaning, since a symbol can take on so many different meanings at once, and one person can't always see them all.

Ultra Magnus, from the moment he arrived to Earth, was a very strict bot. Having grown very used to customary commander behavior, he did the same on this new planet, expecting things to go the same way they had been for, I'm assuming, a logn time. He ordered the other bots around, intimidated the humans, coming across as very tight-fisted. Wheeljack was initially hostile towards Ultra Magnus, but we found out later that he was not upset with the commander, but rather Bulkhead.

He was angry at Bulkhead, his close, possibly his closest, friend for leaving the Wreckers to join with Optimus Prime and his mechs. Of course, this was not Bulkhead's intention, but Wheeljack felt hurt and abandoned, and took his anger out on Ultra Magnus, by being defiant. On the inside, the white Wrecker is a team player, and he has proven this numerous times, but because he felt the way he did, he had shut himself off from others, and shut down, preventing others from getting close to him. This is possibly because he feared that the next bot would 'leave' him, as he believed Bulkhead did, and did not want to deal with that pain again. This process of shutting down and off defined his status as a 'rogue', building an emotional and physical barrier around the white Wrecker. Just before Wheeljack could become attached to anyone again at the Autobot base, he would leave, putting distance between himself and others, and thus, a physical barrier, always giving a reason other than the truth as to why.

But, this is about Ultra Magnus, not the White Wrecker. Wheeljack will be discussed at another time, I suppose.

To Ultra Magnus's surprise, and not mine, his methods were having a negative effect on the team. I am sure that, for many years before, Ultra Magnus ran things efficiently with his methods, when he was not on Earth. On this planet, the war has changed quite a bit, as well as the bots fighting the war. Ultra Magnus's 'my way or the highway' attitude will only drive wedges between the bots, something that is on the list of absolute last things we need for the Autobots. This tight grip on power is something Ultra Magnus seems to be reluctant to surrender. This hold on power came, in my opinion, as a symbol, specifically his right hand.

The right hand in literature can symbolize the grip on power, and this seems to be the case here in Transformers: Prime. The hands are used to grab and hold, among other things. For Ultra Magnus, he is attempting to hold power over the others in the base, as he once did for, I assume, many others.

After the sadness and sympathy I felt for Ultra Magnus after the Dragon, in robot mode, landed hard on him, crushing his fingers into a mess of sparking wires and energon, after I felt his cries of agony in my heart, I saw that, in losing his right hand, he will never have the power he used to have over mechs beneath him.

I'm sure the fingers are replaceable, seeing that he is not an organic creature, but what they represent is not. The crushed fingers showed that he won't be able to control them, the other Autobots, and that another method of cooperation must be chosen in order to be compatible with the others and how they operate as well.

Through this I have seen that, in Ultra Magnus losing his digits, old ways cannot be held so tightly, and that things inevitably change. This is nothing new to me, but this concept is clear in this incident, and throughout in the series. This is the broader concept that I have come down to for Ultra Magnus's loss: Things change, and people _must_ adapt according to these changes. Or else the change will be forced.

As I go farther into this, more and more symbols arise, and not all of them are easy to see and uproot, to find the real meaning underneath. Some of them, I may not see and analyze. But you might.

As this familiar and true phrase goes, there is more to this than meets the eye.

**I've have been able to see symbolism - well, now, anyway. After reading the book in my AP Language and Composition class my junior year **_**How to Read Literature like a Professor **_**by Thomas C. Foster (a surprisingly good book, might I add), I've been better than I've ever been at picking up on symbols and things of that nature. **

**In fact, what inspired me to do this was mainly seeing the huge amount of symbolism going on in **_**Man of Steel**_**. I saw the film yesterday, rather ironically, on the Fourth of July. I saw that the movie made a point to show that Kal-El, or Superman, as we humans know him, was a Christ figure in numerous scenes. I just may write of this later... **

**But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. **

**Till next time! :)**

**P.S. If you haven't done so already, I would highly recommend you go see the movie **_**Man of Steel**_**, even if you aren't into Superman. I wasn't into him myself, and yet I found the film to be absolutely phenomenal. And that's saying the very least.**


End file.
